Quotes About Observation

Often when you are starting out in comedy, you will find that people will laugh at the things you didn't think were funny. It's important to pay attention also to what people are laughing at when you are just talking in regular conversation. Often that is when you are truly being yourself.

Often the starting point for characters, for me, is finding a little, most minor detail, and I'll go from there.

Scientific inquiry starts with observation. The more one can see, the more one can investigate.

Flirting all starts with eye contact! You can tell a girl is into you if she's across the room and still making eye contact with you.

Normally when I look at stuff, I try to look at the good things. When I watch video, I try to watch the good starts so I can see how my mechanics are in those.

When someone like Richard Branson goes up there and starts doing chartered flights... and you can look back on Earth and see the Earth's curvature, I'll believe the Earth is a globe.

One can state, without exaggeration, that the observation of and the search for similarities and differences are the basis of all human knowledge.

In so far as a scientific statement speaks about reality, it must be falsifiable; and in so far as it is not falsifiable, it does not speak about reality.

All science is based on models, and every scientific model comprises three distinct stages: statement of well-defined hypotheses; deduction of all the consequences of these hypotheses, and nothing but these consequences; confrontation of these consequences with observed data.

We're all living blinkered lives, and we're not seeing what's going on and looking to change it. I'm not saying that everyone has to make a political statement, but we need to be more aware of what's happening and why.

There are no Rabbits in the north-west. This statement, far from final, is practically true today, but I saw plenty of Lynxes, and one cannot write of ducks without mentioning water.

When I was at school, one of my teachers had two statements hanging from the board all year: 'Be observant' and 'Be empathetic.'

As an artist, you're just observing the world around you. So much is overwhelming and it's all so inescapable that it can't all speak to general cultural statements.

A static universe isn't physically self-consistent.

I used to make my living by understanding people. And the way I learned to understand them was by observing them. I would sit in a train station or a bus station or a restaurant. And I would watch people. I would watch how they related to one another. I would try to get some insight into them and make them as predictable as I could in my mind.

I used to try and find inspirations everywhere - I would go to the airport or train station and just study people, the way they moved and interacted and their expressions. But I can't do that now, I'd be bombarded by people with their phones - selfie requests.

It's often the case that great artists - people like Bruce Springsteen - tend to pick up the subterranean rumblings of profound social change long before the economic statisticians notice them. Changes start long before they become statistics.

Psychologists really aim to be scientists, white-coat stuff, with elaborate statistics, running experiments.

Coughs seem very common here, especially among the children, though people look strong and healthy, but in the absence of proper statistics one cannot undertake to say whether the district is a healthy one or not.

The relationship between critic and writer is similar to the one between the pigeon and the statue.

There is none of that feeling about art that you meet everywhere in Europe. There you will hear people say, 'Oh, you must see such-and-such a statue at 4 o'clock in the afternoon; then the light is beautiful,' or, 'See this monument in the early morning; the light is best for it then.' Do you ever hear anything like that from an American?

Comedy is to force us to observe ourselves in ways that are humorous and yet, at the end of the day, that cause us enough discomfort with the status quo to make a change.

I didn't realize I wanted to write about D.C. until after 2000. Even though I was a comedy writer, I stayed away from that subject on purpose. It took attaining some distance and perspective.

I am a committed observer. I like staying in the background and seeing what's going on.